By Marney Blom
Israel celebrated Purim this week, the colourful yearly Jewish festival that commemorates the story of Queen Esther. It’s the biblical account of the beautiful young Jewish heroine and her uncle Mordecai who together saved the Jewish people from annihilation, approximately two and a half thousand years ago.
In Israel the Purim holiday is an occasion for the corporate reading of the Megillat Esther – otherwise known as the book of Esther – in synagogues, often in a light-hearted and joyous fashion. At Jerusalem’s reform Kol HaNeshama Synagogue, congregants came for the reading dressed in costume.
“My last name in Hebrew means horses,” said Gaby Sayah. “So our whole family dressed up as horses. My brother made [our costumes] out of balloons.”
From jokers to ethnic costumes, clowns to sea creatures, even a rabbi dressed as Star Trek’s captain Picard – their creativity was only outdone by the noise made at the mention of the name Hamen – the villain of the Purim story.
“It is a commemoration of Jews surviving. We’ve been through a lot and we are still going through it,” reflected Miriam Weinberg, a nurse at the American International School who had come to the Purim service dressed as Cleopatra. “We carry on … and we can still do it with joy.
The celebration of Purim doesn’t stop in the synagogues.†Israelis, young and old, don costumes in the streets and in the marketplace. For many the holiday is a welcomed diversion from the escalating security concerns in the region.
“We can release what we have been taking [in] all year. Most of the holidays are very heavy,” said an Israeli dressed in a Mexican costume. “We are talking a lot about wars, how we won, how we lost … [Purim] is about being happy, about releasing all your problems.”
And as a nation, Israel has more than its share of problems and security challenges. According to retired Israeli Major General Amos Yadlin, the director of Israel’s Institute of National Security Studies (INSS), the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran is merely months away.
[The] Iranian nuclear program will become even more dangerous. They have all the ingredients for a nuclear bomb. They know how to spin centrifuges – they have 10,000 centrifuges. They have enough material for five to seven bombs. Strategically they are ready,” stated Yadlin at the INSS headquarters in Tel Aviv. “Why they are not breaking out tonight or yesterday [is] because it will take them about four to six months to enrich the uranium, which is now in the low level of enrichment or medium level of enrichment, to a military grade.”
As imposed sanctions and attempts at talks with the Iranians have borne little success, Iran appears brazen in its pursuit of a nuclear bomb. The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) recently reported the installation of 180 advanced centrifuges that could significantly speed up the development of a nuclear weapon in Iran.
As the threat of a nuclear Iran grows, a rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel’s southern coastal town of Ashkelon during this past week. This most recent attack – the first since last November’s ceasefire – along with the security concerns associated with a weakening Syrian government, have made the story of Esther a timely reminder: a higher authority, the God of Israel, the one whom many Israeli’s call HaShem, is ultimately watching over Israel.
“This looks like the first true existential threat of annihilation of the Jewish people here because atomic weaponry could do what nothing else could do,” said Rabbi Shimon Hurwitz of Jerusalem. “But in the meantime we keep praying and hope that HaShem will pull off another miracle.”
Marney Blom is news director for the Acts News Network.
Copyright 2012 © Acts News Network, Inc.